How did you wake up this morning? Refreshed and alert? Ready to face the world or maybe already drained at the prospect of the day ahead? Maybe the day has already started with the sights, sounds and smells assaulting you leaving you with no room for peace and quiet.
That’s Entertainment paints a bleak picture of limited hope. It’s an impressionistic poem evocing an urban soundscape where sensory overload and oppression make for a brutish life and empty future. Neighbours live cheek by jowl in a wasteland without cause for individual optimism, a blueprint for the later disillusionment of A Town Called Malice. Like …Malice the music and the lyrics are at odds with each other. One is borderline Motown, upbeat in tempo but downbeat in its message of futile everyday lives; the other has a light airy, acoustic sound at odds with its lyrical tension and irony.
It begins with a stanza of grating urban noises – “A police car and a screaming siren/ Pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete/ A baby wailing, a stray dog howling/ The screech of brakes and lamplight blinking”. These are evocative images which have us on edge immediately. That, Weller observes, is entertainment – these harsh vignettes are both the intrusions and highlights of daily life in urban Britain as entered the 1980s. It’s a brutal time also: “A smash of glass and the rumble of boots/ An electric train and a ripped up phone booth/ Paint splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/ Lights going out and a kick in the balls”. More harsh, unpleasant images. Weller has already portrayed a mugging victim in Down In The Tube Station at Midnight and a couple at the hands of a skinhead gang in ‘A’ bomb in Wardour Street so the violence is almost an incidental every-day threat. The casual reference confirms this as a time of fear – social unrest, sporadic riots, an ugly time.
These intense moments of noise, fear and urban disintegration play against a listless time of high unemployment and a lack of hope: “Days of speed and slow-time Mondays/ Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday”. For a 22 year old Weller this is a reflection of a time when he and his peers are bursting with adolescent/ early 20’s energy. For those trapped in a land of little opportunity after the Winter of Discontent and prior to Thatcher’s economic lift-off, there is a palpable frustration. This trapped energy is reflected in the emphasis in the some of the singing and the accelerated acoustic strum shortly before each chorus.
Even the prospect of a new summer’s day is tainted: “Waking up at 6 AM on a cool warm morning/ Opening the windows and breathing in petrol.” Life is to be lived in the future because there is nothing to do now and only escapism. “Watching the telly and thinking ‘bout your holidays” and “wishing you were far away”.
So, what about love and human intimacy? No – “cuddling a warm girl and smelling stale perfume” shows an objectification and disgust. Romance is meaningless – it’s an escape from the “always-on” nature of urban life and lack of future. “Two lovers missing the tranquillity of solitude.” This is the far cry from the passion, energy and excitement of Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour, as covered on All Mod Cons.
Although the language is determinedly vernacular it breaks into moments of more obvious poetry. Despite its emptiness, “Two lovers kissing masks a scream of midnight/ Two lovers missing the tranquillity of solitude” hints at opportunity through its eloquence. This is deliberate in contrast with the more brutal language of “Pissing down with rain” and “a kick in the balls”. The melody of the chorus is uplifting, catchy and seemingly carefree. The verses are claustrophobic in sentiment, but the choruses are utter escape – the soaring la-la-las are starkly whimsical in comparison. They are a temporary escape and this is where the song gets its real lift.
The lyrics are a portrait of boredom, decay and frustration. They are a sketch of daily life that will ring true to anyone of a certain age trapped in an urban working class estate, especially at that time. Weller plays back a sense of entrapment. He had already starkly contrasted the haves and the have-nots with Eton Rifles*; a bitter song rife with the injustice of the accident of birth. Unlike Eton Rifles and many Jam songs That’s Entertainment is not overtly aggressive. Weller would practically spit his lyrics at times with undisguised venom against choppy, angular guitar sounds. Here the lyrics are more subtle and pointed, but more evocative. The delivery is subtler too.
The world of That’s Entertainment is light years away from privilege, money, ambition and hope. It’s a harsh reality. In covering the Kinks David Watts Weller had already shown that there was another life out there and he aspired to it (although not necessarily the homoerotic subtext). Like Ray Davis, he also had an idealised sense of England (English Rose) and when this dream meets urban reality the disillusion manifests brutally in That’s Entertainment. It’s no wonder that romance is dead here.
The Jam had a brief lifespan (1977 – 1982). The band emerged along with the punk scene, but although there was an angry attitude this was never a punk group. Its musical hinterland was the Kinks, The Who, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. In Paul Weller the Jam also had a politicised spokesman capable of capturing the time and its mood. He said he wrote the song in 10 minutes, “coming home pissed from the pub on the bus”.
In those 10 minutes he sketched out a beak but familiar landscape and set it to an optimistic melody. The contrast between them could not be greater. Ironically (or perhaps deliberately) That’s Entertainment is exactly that – it focuses on the grit and malaise of everyday life, but it also provides three and a half minutes of glorious escape. Clever. That’s Entertainment.
Just want audio? Listen here: http://grooveshark.com/s/That+s+Entertainment/2IyrnF?src=5
*A postscript: I’d always thought that Eton Rifles was a less than subtle dig at the toffs. In researching this piece I discovered that it was inspired by a genuine coming together of a Right To Work protest march in Slough and a group of Eton College pupils. The marchers were jeered by the Etonians and a fight broke out. Despite their greater numbers the marchers were given a collective bloody nose. Weller took the episode and used it as a motif for the unemployed fighting against a system loaded against them.
Music Noises 